Use Case – Authenticated Support and Sales by Telia’s Virtual Assistant Mia

People have an increasing need to get information quickly. No matter whether it is 3am or 3pm, the data has to be available immediately without friction. This is setting a high bar for customer service at any company. In order to make things effortless and easy for customers, the telecom company Telia in Estonia created a virtual assistant called Mia. Customers can visit Telia’s website, type their questions as free text into the chat window on the website and Mia answers them in less than a second.

The virtual assistant was created together with AlphaBlues, an AI start-up focused on creating virtual assistants for customer support and sales. The company’s CEO Indrek Vainu explains that Mia has already been talking to tens of thousands of customers and her capabilities are constantly increasing. Mia has been trained to understand Estonian free text on the company’s AlphaAI conversational platform.

What makes Mia special is that she is able to respond personally to people’s questions. As an example, you can ask Mia “how big is my invoice?”. Mia will then ask the customer to authenticate himself and pulls the exact answer from Telia’s database (such as “you have an upcoming payment of €35.25 due on March 20th”). Such an approach is powerful as it provides detailed information instantly and makes customers’ lives even more comfortable and fast.

In addition, Mia is connected to Telia’s customer service. So if Mia cannot help the customer in answering their query, she will forward the conversation to Telia’s customer service representative. Such seamless handover assures that customers get served swiftly and in the best possible manner.

But Mia is about more than just customer support. It also gives personalized offers for customers. As an example at the end of each answer, Mia asks if the answer was helpful. If the customer clicks yes, then here Mia recommends to check out a gift for the upcoming Women’s Day. Mia is capable of triggering sales call to actions based on timely events and also on the customer’s data (e.g. what products they have bought in the past, what services they are using). It paves way for a powerful product recommendation that is personalized and context dependent and enables Mia to be a smart sales assistant 24/7.